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(From left to right) Bart Friedman, Nancy Cain, Tom Weinberg, and Elon Soltes critique CBS' coverage of Super Bowl X (1976) in TVTV SUPERBOWL, a video documentary that takes an irreverent, behind-the-scenes look of America's love of pro football. |
The
Challenge of Creating an Afterlife for Media The setting of Hirokazu
Kore-eda's film "After Life" (Japan, 1998) is purgatory, but it's
not a limbo where departed, suffering souls expiate their sins. In
this version, the dead aren't required to atone for misdeeds, but
to reflect on their past. In Kore-eda's vision, purgatory is a shabby
state archive where sincere workers execute bureaucratic functions
with efficiency and courtesy. Staff archivists perform an intake of
the clients, calmly inform them that they are dead, and instruct that
they must choose a single memory from their entire lives as a keepsake
for all eternity. The characters recall and relish sights, smells,
sensations and tastes. Memories include an awkward conversation between
lovers on a park bench, a solo flight in an airplane, a dance in a
red dress, and a shower of cherry blossom petals on a spring day.
The archivists transcribe the memories and collaborate with a production
team of cinematographers, designers and art directors to re-create
them into a low-budget film. After a public screening of the finished
films, the dead move on to the afterlife with their single memory.
The films are later acquired into the collective "archive" of memory,
and shelved in cans in a climate-controlled storage. Watching Kore-eda's
film, one cannot help but reflect on one's personal life: Is our time
on earth meaningful and memorable? Living in a culture that produces
a surfeit of tele-vision, film and multimedia, imagine the difficulty
of choosing nor only a "real" memory, but also a single memory of
a media event. As entertainment continues to expand into infinite
universes of theaters, streams, channels, webs and networks, our televisual
and filmic memory tends to spill over into our memory of "real" events.
As with Kore-eda's film, the line between fact and fiction blurs.
In "After Life" a young man defiantly chooses not to select a memory.
He argues that because memory is so easily reconstructed, it would
be more "responsible" to choose a dream or a memory of the future.
Acknowledging that the human brain cannot possibly hold all recordings
of mediated memory, museums in the middle of the 20th century took
upon the role of archiving these images by establishing photography
and film departments. More recently, museums have created video archives.
The Jewish Museum in New York established the National Jewish Archive
of Broadcasting in 1981 with the purpose of collecting, preserving,
and exhibiting broadcast material pertaining to the Jewish experience.
The NJAB is a collection of over 4000 audio and video programs from
1948 to the present that pertain to the Jewish experience. The collection
includes a variety of broadcast genres including documentary, advertising,
news, drama and comedy. These time-based artifacts are exhibited with
the rest of the Museum's collection of 30,000 artworks and physical
objects. By generating diverse educational programs, the NJAB not
only serves the Museum, but also the academy, the industry, and the
general public interested in expressions of Jewishness in media. However,
a broadcast collection in the context of an art museum is at times
an awkward fit from the perspective of both the curator and the maker.
Of course, television and radio do not share the same qualities of
conoisseurship that curators apply to fine art. In the early years
of television, most independent producers did not create costly kinescopes
of their broadcasts because they thought the public 
would
not be interested in their work in the future. In addition, both visual
artists and television producers believed that their work was created
in a particular moment - any attempt at preservation and re-creation
was unthinkable or absurd. Only recently have film and photography
secured their place in the museum storage rooms and galleries. Video
and other contemporary ephemera (digital art, installation, performance,
etc.) are just beginning to be actively acquired, cataloged and accessioned
- and with great difficulty. Even in climate-controlled storage, video
has a limited shelf life. The rapid obsolescence of equipment and
formats (2", 1", ²", Pi", Betamax, VHS, Betacam SP, Digital Betacam,
D1, D2, D3, DV, DVD, etc.) pose the greatest challenge to video preservation.
In "After Life", reality is recorded and logged on videotape and used
by the dead as reference for selecting a memory. Their re-constructed
memories are recorded on film, a media with established preservation
protocols. "After Life" reflects the notion that raw video footage
appears both more immediate and more ephemeral than a crisply edited
film. Indeed, if video reflects our raw reality, and the public con-tinues
to make greater demands for the re-birth of its televisual heritage,
perhaps a greater amount of attention should be directed towards video
preservation. An archive or museum is often likened to a cemetery
- a place where art and artifacts go to die after they are no longer
circulating in the market. However, many media archivists and curators
are seeking out methods of preservation and finding new uses for media
as cultural artifacts. Most importantly they are striving to reinvent
the museum-archive as an afterlife according to Kore-eda's vision:
a site of dialogue and creativity. c. page 6 On Board the Media Bus:
Harold's Bar Mitzvah and Guerilla Television The Jewish Museum's National
Jewish Archive of Broadcasting collects television and radio pertaining
to the Jewish experience including Seinfeld episodes, Manischewitz
wine commercials, public television documentaries, and alternative
programs that sometimes do not fit neatly into traditional genres.
One of the most important examples of independent broadcasting in
the collection is Harold's Bar Mitzvah (1977), a 30-minute video by
Bart Friedman which was first shown at The Jewish Museum in the 1988
exhibition Time and Memory: Video Art and Identity. Narrating behind
the camera, Friedman guides the viewer in three sections through the
preparation and celebration of a coming-of-age ceremony. Part home
movie and part social commentary, Harold's Bar Mitzvah is above all
a gift to the young man. At the end of the video, Friedman includes
a dedication in titles: "So Harold, you see a good bar mitzvah consists
of eating, dancing and singing - may your life be like a bar mitzvah."
The video begins with Sam and Miriam Ginsberg at home preparing for
their grandson's event. Sam models his fifteen year-old suit as his
proud wife brushes out the wrinkles and confirms that Harold's check
is in her husband's pocket. The Ginsbergs proceed to drive from the
Catskill Mountains to Temple Emanu-El in Lynbrook, Long Island. In
honor of the Sabbath, the rabbi refuses Friedman's request to tape
the actual service, but generously offers to recreate the ceremony
on the following day. In the manner of a Hollywood movie mogul, the
rabbi sternly orders the family to take their places on the pulpit
and directs the mise-en-scene. The final section, containing footage
of the party at Fontainebleau Caterers, provides a striking contrast
with the first section in which we hear Sam's Yiddish melodies. Amid
flash photography, wet kisses, and the "hokey-pokey," Friedman's camera
captures wishes of health and wealth from the multi-generational guests.
The alternative media movement took root in Sam and Miriam Ginsberg's
home in upstate New York, close to the vacation resorts of the "Borscht
Belt." The invention of the Sony Portapak in 1965 enabled artist/activists
like Friedman, who challenged what was perceived as government and
corporate control of public information, to paint portraits of inhabitants
on the margins of the American landscape using electronic imaging
tools. Friedman and his colleagues formed Media Bus (an off-shoot
of the Soho artist collective Videofreex) and established Lanesville
TV in 1972 as the world's first pirate television station. The Ginsbergs
of Lanesville, NY rented their twenty-room farmhouse to Media Bus,
where Friedman and his colleagues produced and illegally broadcasted
some of the first community-based videos. In describing the mission
of Media Bus, Friedman states that, "radical hippie video social documentarian
artists took every opportunity to examine the quirks of people and
their institutions." As Eastern European immigrants with radical,
left-wing politics, the quirky Ginsbergs provided a supportive atmosphere
in which Media Bus was able to flourish. The pioneering work of Friedman
and Media Bus ultimately paved the way for today's community cable
television and the internet where concepts of public access and participation
are often taken for granted. Harold's Bar Mitzvah is one of the most
significant works in the collection of the National Jewish Archive
of Broadcasting because of its content and context. Friedman was one
of the earliest artists to examine Jewish themes in the evolving body
of work then known as "video art." His video captures the intersection
of two generations and two cultures of Old World and New World. It
is a dialogue between a young filmmaker and his elderly subject who,
despite gaps in generation and culture, share a passion for life,
humor, radicalism and Yiddishkeit. Produced during the wake of racial
pride and "power to the people," Harold's Bar Mitzvah demonstrates
the desire of Jewish artists to express their ethnicity -- something
which many of their parents aggressively concealed - and to reject
corporate America. Andrew Ingall, M.A. is Coordinator of the National
Jewish Archive of Broadcasting at The Jewish Museum, New York and
a founding member of Independent Media Arts Preservation. The Jewish
Museum will present Harold's Bar Mitzvah in Moving Portraits: The
Jewish American Family in Video Art and Alternative Media in Winter
1999-2000.